Swimming Escherichia coli Cells Explore the Environment by Lévy Walk
- 26 February 2021
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Society for Microbiology in Applied and Environmental Microbiology
- Vol. 87 (6)
- https://doi.org/10.1128/aem.02429-20
Abstract
E. coli cells swim in aqueous environment in a random walk of alternating runs and tumbles. The diffusion characteristics of this random walk remains unclear. Here, by tracking the swimming of wildtype cells in a 3d homogeneous environment, we found that their trajectories are super diffusive, consistent with Lévy walk behavior. For comparison, we tracked the swimming of mutant cells that lack the chemotaxis signaling noise (the steady-state fluctuation of the concentration of the chemotaxis response regulator CheY-P), and found that their trajectories are normal diffusive. Therefore, wildtype E. coli cells explore the environment by Lévy walk, which originates from the chemotaxis signaling noise. This Lévy walk pattern enhances their efficiency in environmental exploration. Importance E. coli cells explore the environment in a random walk of alternating runs and tumbles. By tracking the 3d trajectories of E. coli cells in aqueous environment, we find that their trajectories are super diffusive, with a power-law shape for the distribution of run lengths, which is characteristics of Lévy walk. We further show that this Lévy walk behavior is due to the random fluctuation of the output level of the bacterial chemotaxis pathway, and it enhances the efficiency of the bacteria in exploring the environment.Keywords
Funding Information
- National Natural Science Foundation of China (11925406)
This publication has 42 references indexed in Scilit:
- Multiple sources of slow activity fluctuations in a bacterial chemosensory networkeLife, 2017
- Quantitative Modeling of Bacterial Chemotaxis: Signal Amplification and Accurate AdaptationAnnual Review of Biophysics, 2013
- Making sense of it all: bacterial chemotaxisNature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology, 2004
- The Rotary Motor of Bacterial FlagellaAnnual Review of Biochemistry, 2003
- Binding of the Escherichia coli response regulator CheY to its target measured in vivo by fluorescence resonance energy transferProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2002
- Real-Time Imaging of Fluorescent Flagellar FilamentsJournal of Bacteriology, 2000
- An Ultrasensitive Bacterial Motor Revealed by Monitoring Signaling Proteins in Single CellsScience, 2000
- Robustness in simple biochemical networksNature, 1997
- Phosphorylation-dependent binding of a signal molecule to the flagellar switch of bacteria.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 1993
- Chemotaxis in Escherichia coli analysed by Three-dimensional TrackingNature, 1972